


Narrative Necessity

by QuickLikeLight



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alcohol, Best Friends, First Kiss, Freshman Year, Hockey Robot Jack Zimmermann, Internalized Homophobia, Johnson the Meta Goalie, M/M, Making Out, POV Shitty Knight, Platonic Romance, Sort of? - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-10
Updated: 2016-02-10
Packaged: 2018-05-19 14:26:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5970274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuickLikeLight/pseuds/QuickLikeLight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“When they built your beautiful Canadian hockey robot body they really didn’t cut any corners, huh?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Narrative Necessity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ofherlionheart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ofherlionheart/gifts).



> Many, many thanks to [LC](http://anomalagous.tumblr.com) and [Heidi](http://halfhardtorock.tumblr.com) for beta reading and hand-holding for me. This would be an unfinished pile of mess otherwise.
> 
> This is tagged "platonic romance" but I really don't know that that's the appropriate tag - I'm thinking more... deep affection and care that could be romantic or platonic or sexual but lives in sort of a mixture of those three places at once. I also wanted the reader to be able to interpret that relationship however they liked, really. 
> 
> Warnings: Drunken making out - Shitty is definitely buzzed when he makes a move on Jack, but he's not black-out drunk. There is also a very mild sideways reference to incest because of Shitty's use of the word "brother" for "friend" - there is no actual incest in this fic but I wanted to be sure no one was triggered by it because of a lack of tagging.
> 
> My giftee requested this prompt for a friend. I hope that it's pleasing to you both, ofherlionheart!

“Yo, is this the place?” Shitty asks, tossing his bag down in the stands. There are a few guys milling around, all in sweats or pajamas. A dude he thinks he met at orientation - junior, defenseman - is slugging back the strongest smelling coffee Shitty’s ever smelled and that is _saying something_.

A dude in just a t-shirt and gym shorts near him looks up and offers a soft smile before saying, “It does look like it, doesn’t it?”

It takes Shitty a minute to realize that was supposed to be something like an answer to his question. He looks around - and yeah, of course, _Faber_ , he’d be an idiot not to know it. Especially since someone’s already on the ice.

The guy skates like a freight train, running all over the ice with power and a grace that seems barely held together at the seams. He’s doing practice drills, stick slicing over the ice, moving so fast it’s tough for Shitty to keep his eyes on the puck. The guy shoots toward the empty net and -

 _Misses_.

“Wow.” Shitty plops down on the bench. He can’t take his eyes off the guy on the ice, who is now tossing his fucking stick into the glass and tearing off his helmet to reveal -

“He’s something isn’t he?” Gym Shorts Guy asks.

“Is that _Jack Zimmermann_?” Shitty’s shocked - he hasn’t thought about the Zimmermann kid since the whole drugs bust-up a few years back, but even from here it’s impossible not to recognize Bad Bob’s profile made younger and - well, sadder.

“What do you think? I think he’s a good addition to the team. It won’t matter for a few more years but he’s obviously going to be necessary for the protagonists’ _Overcoming the Psycho-Emotional Trauma of Institutionalized Homophobia to Become His Most Authentic Self_ arc, so I feel like it’s good that he’s starting this now instead of, say, next year.” Gym Shorts Guy pulls a goalie mask out of his bag as if he didn’t just completely throw Shitty off his game.

“What the - wait. Are you a goalie, brah?”

“You couldn’t tell?” Gym Shorts Guy holds out his hand, and Shitty takes it on autopilot. “John Johnson. Pleased to meet you Mr. Knight. We’re going by a chosen name now, right?”

“Uh. Call me Shitty,” he says, dazed as Johnson shakes his hand. “Believe it or not, it’s a better name than an actual one.”

“Oh, I’m aware.” Johnson smiles cryptically and then tosses his head toward the locker rooms, where Jack Zimmermann is already making his way. “Better get down there. If Jack’s going to be prepared when the narrative starts, he’ll need a strong pre-established relationship with you, and you’re about to miss your entrance.”

“My entrance?” Shitty asks - but he knows better than to argue with a goalie, even one as weird as Johnson. He shoulders his stuff and heads for the lockers.

  


 

Shitty is drunk, too drunk really, much more drunk than he intended to get, and while it’s not like his boarding school career was pristine or anything, life at Samwell is much, _much_ different than he’s used to. He can’t help it if he goes a little off the rails on occasion. It’s completely understandable - to be expected, even!

At least, that’s what he tells himself as he barrels into Jack Zimmermann’s room, across the hall from his in the frog dorms, and says, “When they built your beautiful Canadian hockey robot body they really didn’t cut any corners, huh?”

Some of his words are slurred, but he can tell from the way Jack’s eyebrows furrow further in that at least most of what he said makes sense. Or it doesn’t make sense at all and Jack is just constantly making that face. One of those things.

“Move over brah,” he says, lurching toward Jack’s bed. “I need _space_.”

They’re friends, Shitty thinks, or at least as close to friends as Jack lets himself have. He’s watched Jack skirt around the team, duck past party invites and laugh off insinuations that he’s too busy with girls to hang out with the bros. He’s watched as Jack has settled in, retiring to his room early in the evening and not coming back out until morning practice, sometimes with dark circles but mostly clear-eyed and present.

He thinks maybe Jack is trying to make up for something - but there’s no one here to know that. No one Jack lets get quite close enough to know.

“What you need is to go back to your room,” Jack says, but he scoots over in his Twin XL anyway, pressing his back against the wall. “There’s - uh, powerade in the mini-fridge.”

“A gift to mankind.” Shitty stumbles toward the fridge, grabbing at a bottle of cool, life-giving blue juice and then sort of meanders gracefully into Jack’s bed. He thrusts the bottle at Jack, hoping he won’t need to explain - _ah_ , he doesn’t. Jack takes it and opens it and even goes so far as to tip it up against Shitty’s mouth, feeding it to him like Shitty is a precious baby bird and Jack is his -

He’s going to stop that metaphor. He’s going to stop it right fucking there.

“Not a bird,” he slurs, and Jack laughs and gives him another drink.

“Birds don’t drink themselves into a stupor after a big win,” Jack agrees. “Guess you deserve it though.”

“Hell yeah I deserve it!” Shitty’s two assists helped win the game and he knows that, and he knows Jack knows that, which is better than knowing himself, really. “I d’serve - I deserve _all_ of it.”

“Seems like you already drank all of it.” Jack tries to put the Powerade away, but Shitty clamors for one more drink, opening and shutting his mouth in a way that makes Jack flush and smile just a little, a small thing he could deny in the morning, but Shitty saw it, he did.

“You like this,” Shitty laughs, and then Jack’s pouring more juice into his mouth, and he’s suddenly forcibly reminded that Powerade tastes a little like someone came in a pitcher of Kool-Aid, which apparently he says out loud. Oh well.

Jack has one big hockey robot hand over his face and his shoulders are shaking a little, just enough that Shitty thinks -

“Are you _laughing_?”

He _is_ , he is laughing, and Shitty can’t stand it really, sort of tackles him to the bed, mindless of the open Powerade bottle, and pulls that hand away long enough to see Jack Zimmermann’s face lit up with a brilliant smile, the biggest one he’s ever seen off ice.

It’s beautiful. _Jack_ is beautiful. Not in the way that people he wants to fuck are beautiful, but in the way that sunrises when you haven’t slept and the puck sailing over the ice and the first snowfall of the season are beautiful.

Okay and a little bit in the way people he wants to fuck are beautiful, too.

Before he realizes what he’s doing, Shitty leans down and kisses him right on his smiling mouth. He expects Jack to freeze up, to push him away and tell him that _Jack Zimmermann doesn’t_ , _can’t_ , but what he gets instead are big hands in his hair, grown out a little already from his boarding school high-and-tight, and the soft rub of Jack’s closed mouth on his, and a little jolt of pleasure that worms its way down from his gut into his groin in less time than it takes for Johnson - the _goalie_ , not his dick - to go from engagingly confusing to just plain uncomfortable.

“Whoa, bro,” he says, face still pressed against Jack’s own, and Jack sort of stiffens at that, a delayed response, Shitty thinks, his brain catching up to him, and - they need to stop that. It should stop right now. “No, no, chill with me, c’mon.”

He rubs his hands greedily over Jack’s shoulders, massaging away the stiffness until Jack sort of melts underneath him, mouth going soft and easy again.

“That’s right my brother,” Shitty says, leaning up just enough to lick at Jack’s lips. He’s curious what hockey royalty tastes like, if there’ll be sweat on his upper lip or if he was secretly sipping booze just before Shitty burst into his room and found him reading a - he looks for it, tucked lovingly on the windowsill - a _history textbook_.

Mostly Jack tastes like chapstick.

“I don’t think,” Jack says, and it sounds almost deadpan despite the little twitch of a smile on his face, “you should kiss your brothers this way.”

“I kiss my brothers however they want to be kissed,” Shitty says, and he thinks they should both close their eyes, since Jack’s face is mostly a blur in front of him, but he doesn’t want to miss the look on that face as he grinds his hips down slow, rubbing his body down over Jack’s own. He isn’t disappointed - Jack’s eyebrows shoot up and his pupils dilate, and he snorts softly through his frankly unfair nose.

“And you think this is how I want to be kissed?” Jack asks, voice soft like a secret between their mouths. Shitty kisses him again, just the barest brush of lips.

“I think if you didn’t, you would have stopped me already,” he says, practical. “I think you want it, but you don’t want to ask for it. I think you like it, even if you don’t think you can tell me you do.”

“You have me all figured out, huh?” Jack shakes his head, turns his face to the side. His chest heaves slightly, like he’s laughing but he isn’t. Like he’s crying, but he isn’t.

“I don’t think any of us have it figured out,” Shitty says, sliding off of Jack and to the side, but leaving his hands around Jack’s shoulders, pulling him into place until they are curled up facing one another. “We’re all just groping in the dark here, brah - Plato’s cave.”

“History major, not philosophy,” Jack reminds him, but it’s easy, amused. “You might…”

“I might?” Shitty’s thoughts aren’t the jumble that they were when he piled into Jack’s bed. They order themselves neatly despite his best efforts, leaving him hyperaware of the way Jack’s right hand toys with the hem of Shitty’s shirt, rubbing the smooth, worn cotton between his fingers.

“You might not be entirely wrong,” he says, face flushing high on those perfectly sculpted cheekbones. “About the, uh. Kissing.”

“S’that you asking for another?” Shitty teases, but Jack just shrugs and tugs his shirt.

“I’m not, ah - I mean, I couldn’t - but if it was just… friendly?” Jack falters, bringing his hand up to cover his face again. “That’s - that’s not something people do, is it?”

“Who’s people?” Shitty peels Jack’s hand back and sticks it up under his own shirt, the skin of his abdomen heating under the warmth of Jack’s palm. “It’s something we can do. If we want.”

“And you... want?” He looks shy, almost pained, and Shitty cuts him some slack. He presses forward, kissing Jack with affection and greed, the hot shock of his open mouth and the warm comfort of his open eyes.

“I want,” he agrees, and Jack shudders next to him like he’s going to fall apart.

 

In the too-bright light of the morning, Shitty feels significantly less awful than he should but still pretty bad. Jack’s bed is small - way too small for two collegiate hockey players to be bundled into, but that doesn’t stop Shitty from sprawling out across it, limbs flung every direction. He only notices Jack isn’t actually in the bed after feeling blindly around for the Powerade bottle from the night before, and landing on a fresh, cold one instead.

“Drink up,” Jack says and if Shitty wasn’t hungover he’d swear it was a different person inhabiting Jack’s body than had been there last night when he barged in. He sits up slowly, one hand over his eyes, until he can work himself into tailor position and take a sip of the refreshing hydration of life.

“Practice is in an hour,” Jack says, quiet and fond, and Shitty has to squint at him to make sure it really is his favorite almost-android sitting across the room.

“It’s an optional skate,” Shitty reminds him.

“Not if we want to beat Hollyoke.” Jack stands, and Shitty finally makes himself open his eyes all the way so he can watch as Jack tugs on an underarmor top and some basketball shorts. “I want to hit the ice early. Take a shower before practice - you smell.”

“You want me to shower _before_?” Shitty sounds affronted because he _is_. “Wait - who said I was even going?”

“You’re going,” Jack says, and he doesn’t laugh exactly, but it’s a close thing. He pauses in the doorway, backpack slung over his shoulder, wreathed with light from the hall. If Shitty had any eye for art at all - and he doesn’t, he knows, he doesn’t - he’d says it looked a little bit like that. “Shower first. See you at Faber, Shitty.”

It only takes fifteen minutes for Shitty to talk himself into taking a shower.

 

 

 

“So you got past the first barrier,” Johnson says, being weirdly himself at Shitty again. He’s almost gotten used to it.

Almost.

“I have no clue what you’re talking about, brah. Like, ever. At all.”

“It’s fine. Ultimately I’ll graduate without explicitly influencing the plot in any major direction, leaving room for a more robust character to assist with furthering the protagonist’s journey toward -”

“You know what?” Shitty interrupts, tossing his towel into his locker. “It’s fine. I really don’t need to get it. Fully okay with not getting it.”

“Yo, that’s cool,” Johnson says, and he grabs a towel from a bin Shitty hadn’t even noticed before Johnson’s hand was in it. He promises himself not to drink so much after the next game, especially if Jack intends to make all these optional skates mandatory. “As long as you continue to fulfill your narrative duties as Jack Zimmermann’s Best Friend and Confidant, everything will be fine. Which you will. Because, you know, narrative necessity.”

“ _Best_ friend…?” Shitty asks, a little dazed. He hadn’t realized - but it makes something warm and right settle in his stomach despite his confusion at the rest of Johnson’s little speech. He spots Jack coming into the locker room and can’t help the grin that lights up his whole face.

Johnson rolls his eyes as he tosses his bag into his locker and heads for the showers. “If you’re surprised by that, just wait until sophomore year. You’re going to have one hell of a week, buddy.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Your feedback is valuable to all fic writers, and I'm no exception. If you enjoyed this story, please let me know.
> 
> Come find me on [tumblr](http://quicklikelight.tumblr.com).


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